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September 2010

09/29/2010

The Alphaville Herald used to endlessly cover -- and incite -- Soviet-role-playing griefers in SL like Soviet Ghost; now its founder is playing with the real Kremlin.

In all the years that the Alphaville Herald egged on the Communist-meme-mongering Woodbury University (an offshoot of the 4chan/b-tards/ etc. in the virtual world of Second Life), I didn't think Peter Ludlow (Urizenus Sklar) was actually doing the Kremlin's work for it.

To be sure, these script kiddies so gleefully covered -- and heavily incited -- by the Herald not only fetishized Communist insignia, they used the anarcho-commie Bolshevik methods of "the ends justify the means" in a kind of latter-day virtual terrorism, where the role of the "state" (or German financers?) was played by Woodbury University, what Lum Lumley (Scott Jennings) characterized as a Soviet commuter college in suburban Burbank, California.

But other than a Marxist-type paper on "neoliberal policies" read at a conference in St. Petersburg by one Edward Clift, the professor of these kiddies (he was in on it -- he sported the Pool's Out memes like the tell-tale 4chan Afro on his SL avatar), I didn't see any connection between real-life Russia and these affluent wannabee anarchists, or wrong-way Situationists.

With readership in the Alphaville Herald dwindling as Second Life begins to lose its attraction now that three main griefing organizations have been expelled, Ludlow and friends are trying to remake themselves as "relevant" by covering "real-life hacktivism," which shares some DNA with the same opensource cultists that one finds in places like Second Life on the IRC channel.

So now Uri is talking to the real Kremlin, without even truth-in-advertising admission that "RT" -- Russia Today -- is fact a notorious Kremlin propaganda outlet, as everyone knows. Read the site stories, comments and watch all the anti-Western videos for half an hour, and you'll figure it out.

Uri appears on a political talk show that is supposed to be sort of innocuous but sophisticated by a bouncy young thing, Alyona Minkovski, who was born in Moscow but raised in California and now works in the Washington studio (or New York studio) of RT, where Ludlow recently appeared.

What is the purpose of a propaganda show like this, where Uri knowingly assists in delivering the Kremlin's message?

To undermine the West, to distract from Russia, and to create a tacit set of double standards, where movements of dissent that attack Western countries and institutions and ignore Russia can be leveraged by the KGB's successors to keep Russia on top.

Alyona takes the high road by talking about hackers as almost endearing geeks who even have their "code of ethics," she says (like vory v zakone) -- that's said to make them heros and accentuate the point that their largely anti-Western antics are praiseworthy even with the liberal's conscience.

They have two main codes, she explains, "information wants to be free," and "authority should not be trusted, and decentralization must be promoted."

Um, how's that working out in Russia, Alyona? Why did it take so long to expose Luzhkov? And how come the president removes the mayor of a city, instead of the people, through elections of a new mayor of their choice?! Sure, promote decentralization -- but never in your own country, eh?

Uri comes on then first of all to completely exonerate himself from any statement made on the issue by anyone by saying "we don't know enough about all this". Snort. He then assures us that the hacktivist principle is "more or less good". Of course, real "good" hacktivists would really need to divorce themselves from the immorality and criminalization of 4chan and related groups to prove their point, but Ludlow thinks this is all just interesting "emergent behaviour".

Uri then proceeds to engage in the most appalling unethical pronouncement, all on behalf of the Kremlin, on Kremlin TV, and all in an outrageous whitewash of these unethical geeks, and all with a completely preposterous notion that would make even Eddie Haskell blush -- that information just "falls into people's hands". Shame on you, Uri!

Information doesn't just "fall into hands". Even very active journalists and bloggers like me know it seldom just arrives in your email box, you have to go procure it and pull it out of people and triangulate. The information that "fell" into the hands of Wikileaks had an awful lot of help getting there and it was no accident, comrade.

Having laid that absolutely false and propagandistic foundation, the Chomkyist Ludlow then word-salads his way past any misgivings any liberals might have about ethics by implying that each hacktivist then faces a "should I or shouldn't I" moment where this creature of the herd, hitherto guided by the Anonymous Everywhere invisible crowd, now suddenly becomes a responsible individual again and ostensibly weighs the value of divulging the information that "fell into his hands".

Bullshit. Most of these kids just cut and paste and torrent with abandon. They don't wait five seconds before they dump as much as they possibly can into the maw of the Internet (the Wrong Hands story, for example).

Uri pauses for a moment to note that hacktivists in fact decide whether information should be public or private -- as if they have a moment of conscience. More bullshit -- as this is the essential hypocrisy about these thugs: they want everyone else's information to be free, but they distribute it by anonymous accounts and proxies, and hide their own footprint as best they can.

Ludlow just thinks that's "normal" -- hactivists develop encryption tools and decide what to do, locking up their OWN communications above all, and that's just ducky. Plastic Ducky.

That's been my experience, too. The people who want to expose someone else's privacy in various stories always hide their own identity in a deep-throat day-old avatar or anonymous email. Seldom do they want to do themselves what they are about to do to their victims -- er, benefits of their "justice" operations.

And that's the weak point in the entire 4chan/Wikileaks/hacktivist bullshit Bolshevik operation. They want information to be free -- when they want it, except when they don't. It's not about openneses and transparency. It's not about making companies or corporate lawyers accountable. It's about acquiring power for themselves -- absolute power -- through a terrorist-cell-like structured movement and creating a powerfully conservative world, just in the way the Bolsheviks, who are considered by today's Internet ignoramuses to be "progressive" and "radical" -- but who froze modern development and the Enlightenment in their country for 75 years -- plus.

Says Ludlow, "The inflection point is where the decision YOU make is, whether you are a good or bad hacktivist or make a mistake."

Why would that be anything to celebrate? Uri pounds in his thesis -- propaganda bullet point -- that Assange is replaceable, and leaders are dispensable, and their names are legion, and that "the media" is getting it all wrong (unlike the expert Ludlow) by being obsessed with Assange as a "James Bond villain."

But these supposed loose horizontal movements in fact are terribly oppressive and sordid little vertikaly, with tribal leaders exactly like this mangy pup. And when he's unsettled, the place starts to fall apart and people start to leave, as they have been doing. This will not last forever. And it will end in jail sentences -- because the methods cannot attract mainstream, moral people and the coolness of crime wears off once the real paddy wagons start coming around.

Sigh. It's as banal as evil always is. And it *is* evil to arrogate to yourself the right to expose an Afghan civilian to death, or even just some married man in a London suburb to the pain of exposure and divorce because you publicize that he downloads gay porn. It's morally wrong; it can't stand.

Ludlow believes if Assaunge is "rendered ineffective," that it won't matter, that the documents will keep flowing. Well, maybe -- but the evil isn't demonstrable.

Assuange, like Uri and the lovely Alyona, don't have a plan for how to Wikileak the Kremlin or the Taliban's strongholds. They only want to undermine the West, and they shrug about the greater evils in the East. That moral blindness and myopia are typical of American leftists exploited by Kremlin manipulators, but I didn't think it would reach such alarming proportions again so soon in our lifetime after the fall of the USSR in 1991.

Even Uri admits what the downfall of these movements are -- the secret police who encourage the informants' culture: Private Manning bragged about his exploits to a "turncoat hacker", i.e. someone who got a conscience. And there are more of them, and more of another kind--Western intelligent plants who are "boring from within," as Trotsky would say.

"People are doing this [hacking] all over the world, in China, Iran, all over the world," burbles Uri.

Um, you forgot to mention Russia, Uri.

"Governments will crack down, but hacktivist outnumber the number of people the government can throw at the problem." Oh, I dunno. As these Bolsheviks sharpen the Marxist contradictions, more and more people will take sides, and they won't take the side of those who think it's cool to needlessly harm other people.

Alyona goes on feigning the clueless ingenue to the end. Even if Wikileaks vanishes she says -- speaking about them as if they are the heroic dissidents that she doesn't in fact acknowledge in her own country -- "their spirit is still alive" and they "will always be here."

No, and neither will the Alyonas of the world, as the history of Russian power and communism has shown us. Uri is on the wrong side of that history.

The iconic mask of the Anonymous 4chan /b/tard and offshoots movement, fashionable for Yale law students to blog about now deciding they are "passionate people bringing about change"; even Forbes buys the line with a mild caveat.

The Alphaville Herald spent years covering the virtual worlds of the Sims Online (now-closed) and Second Life (still struggling ), among several others like Metaplace, now defunct. Bored with these conflict ridden and ultimately artificial societies, and having wrung just about every bit of faux-news to be extracted from the banal and repetitive antics of griefers and hackers in these worlds, the editors are now turning to "real life" hactivism -- as if this is any less virtual than the virtual worlds. Peter Ludlow, founder of the Herald (Urizenus Sklar), who leaves and returns periodically, is back trying to get the reluctant script-kiddies who make up most of the anonymous readers and commenters on the Herald to get interested in larger political issues. I suspect readers will continue to drop off.

Meanwhile, Uri and his alts and subordinates continue to ring the same ethics-free, maliciously-gleeful chimes they have rung for nearly a decade on the evergreen subterfuge, long-ago perfected as an art form by Eddie Haskell in "Leave it to Beaver," of claiming that an obvious wrong is legitimate when it isn't, and distracting from that illegality with smoke and mirrors.

Leaving the rights and wrongs of the RIAA, aside, asking 4chan to do your justice crusade for you is kinda like asking the mafia to keep your streets clean and your neighbourhood safe. Sure, they may do that, but along the way there will be shoot-outs in strange, darkly-curtained restaurants and bodies floating in the river and that monthly protection fee you have to pay to keep your shop opened. It's like that.

A popular immoral notion shared by ethics-free hackers and their more criminalized and radical channer friends is that if someone has left data available to be stolen or hacked or simply exposed (due to carelessness), then it's the fault of the owner/manager of the data, not the hactivists when it gets outed. This Alice-in-Wonderland reasoning is then replicated by the media and various electronic rights outfits, and becomes a meme of its own -- that the scorn we should feel when data is revealed is not for the hacker, but for the person unable to keep the data secret against assault by the hactivists. It's like being on the wrong side of the date-rape concept.

So it's as if a thief steals my TV, I'm to blame if I left my door open or didn't have a strong enough lock; furthermore, the thief gets to out my e-mail correspondence on the Internet, send fake pizza deliveries and SWAT teams to my home and pillory me on Encyclopedia Dramatica if I call the police and complain.

A group that is supposed to be "protecting our rights" itself undermines the rule of law by picking up this theme, quickly setting aside the problem of the criminality of the 4chan attack, absolving them of all sins and saying the real focus should be on copyright protectors:

While reports have concentrated on the “attack” by 4Chan users that brought their webserver down, the more important questions are:

(a) Why did ACS:Law host email files and sensitive information in a place that could easily be exposed to the public?

(b) Is it legal and permissible to collect and process such information from torrents without permission or knowledge? As we have reported, the EU Data protection authorities think the answer is probably ‘no’. Now the world can see why.

Of course, the obvious piece missing to this one-sided story is how the ACS firm could even come up with a list of targets for their warning letters: they were in the torrents, duh. Funny how the channers don't find anything wrong with the platform-providers or Pirate Bay itself in the first instance leaking people's IDs, but only come down on a copyright lawyer like a ton of bricks when he benefits from this fact to defend his clients. Rupert Murdoch is to blame , they say, for turning over lists of people using Sky who have illegally downloaded media. So, um, Pirate Bay's devs don't keep tracking of any IPs either, *cough*? So the answer is for all Internet uses to use proxies or circumventions as the default, even if they are commiting what *even 4chan* might concede is a crime, like puppy-killing?

So basically "Open Rights" (closed society) is telling us that no one dare ever collect information about you on the Internet, especially while you are committing a crime, or you will infringe EU data protection laws. Um, ok, so...why is it ok for 4chan to grab everybody's data and expose it then?! It wouldn't have been exposed if 4chan hadn't made its assault. Truly concerned and ethical activists could have first tried private correspondence or calling the authorities. Could we circle back to the *facts of the case* please?! Before Rebecca McKinnon comes along any minute to tell us that we need to seek "balance" in these matters...

In this case, the lawyer was sending warning letters to people like pensioners exchanging adult movies or married men downloading gay porn, and now their identities are exposed, causing them embarrassment or even worse things like job loss or divorse. That's unethical -- and yet these "victims of copyright aggression" are the people the Anonymous fucktards claim they are defending from evil RIAA. Look at how they treat them -- collateral damage in a war.

Like the hapless civilians of Afghanistan that Assaunge and Wikileaks were willing to expose, the cynical and arrogant 4chan gang shows its hand truly when they're just as willing to destroy the supposed beneficiaries of their struggle as their targets. It's like the Wrong Hands scandal in Second Life, where the b/tard offshoots in Woodbury University targeted by the JLU, a vigilante group that harassed them by scraping their data, and then wound up dumping a boat load of data collected by the JLU, mainly about their fellow griefers, for everyone to paw over.

It might well be that Andrew Crossley is unethical, I have no idea, because we can't learn the facts of the case certainly from the unethical channers, nor the lap-dog media or the griefer-cheer-leading blogs like Alphaville.

Gloats the anonymous "PaleFire" (a Nabokov reference which is probably a Uri alt)

One blogger cheerfully announces “In a massive triumph for freedom of the Internet a British law firm (ACS: Law) that specialises in anti-piracy cases has been exposed by Internet activists for what it is: a heartless, soulless, money-grubbing conglomeration of complete bastards, who have no respect for human rights, or even humans.”

and then concludes that justice was served and "all's well that ends well."

But wait. Wasn't it wrong to expose all those people in the course of this active measure?

That question seems to be trumped by the emphasis that it was wrong in the first place to threaten a lot of council-flat dwellers with 500 pound fines for downloading files illegally. We'll leave aside the claims that "innocents" were targeted, because we can't be sure if there were industrial-strength file-sharers. The lawyer did this likely because he couldn't get at the larger targets of the platforms that make them available in the first place. So it's a war of attrition. The real culprits are the platform owners like Google, owner of YouTube. Even so, I fail to see why we need countenance the criminality of Pirate Bay for a minute.

A key feature of the 4chan temporary successes in the world of hacking is to make people feel as if they are unstoppable, inevitable -- even normal, reasonable, etc. So to that extent, when somebody like Cross says they only put temporary dents in the copyright protection machine by slowing him down as long as he might wait in line for a latte, they'll be relentless.

So far, the b-tards have successfully hijacked the real point -- now Privacy International is indignantly launching a suit against ACS for privacy invasion -- although um, remember, it's the 4channers that exposed the data, not ACS. PI can't get at "anonymous" however; they will get at a richer and fatter target capable of paying the half a billion (!) pound fine.

Ultimately, however, they cannot go harassing this man and collaterally damaging his alleged victims without further crossing into crimes no one is going to be Haskelled about, and with so many of the little script kiddies all over, risking that one of their number will get exposed accidently through his own stupidity, or be blown in by another one of his disloyal buddies.

That's what happens all the time in these 4chan capers, and it's a pattern you can count on. So you have to keep documenting, exposing and going to the law yourself, and ultimately you will prevail.

He congratulates Michael Arrington, owner of TechCrunch, but only to blast him personally and say the buyout is about Arrington having reached the end of his emotional rope.

"The posts were getting more and more ridiculous and weird," says Feldman -- and I think he means posts like the controversial "women in tech" posts and other stuff that seemed to go off the rails -- and then with angelgate:

"...He actually thought he was a reporter. And just a really negative, dark vibe about the whole thing" -- meaning it was time to "hang it up".

Loren's is probably among the most truthful and knowledgeable about this event so watch his tape.

Pretty stark stuff, and Loren is smart and he should know -- he knows "Mikey" very well, and "Jay" -- Jason Calacanis -- and he says Mikey screwed Jason over on the past deal regarding the TechCrunch 50 conference, which apparently was Steve Gilmor's idea, and he brought Calacanis and Arrington together (so I guess the point is that given how much revenue TechCrunch 50 produced for the business, Calacanis should have been able to get a bigger piece out of an eventual buy-out like this.)

This clash of the titans shouldn't matter to us little guys, but I have an uneasy feeling it does.

I don't have the geek's aversion to AOL at all. I simply don't have a problem with it. I personally found the AOL set-up and vise-like subscription-grab a nuisance, but lots of people I know still have their AOL accounts. Whenever some tech snarks that AOL was a walled garden and that's why it "lost" the Web 1.0, I shrug and ask them how many millions of teenagers on the planet are chatting on AIM right now, AOL's property, and how many are on, oh, I dunno, Thunderbird? AOL's a walled garden; so is TechCrunch a walled garden of insular tekkies talking shop.

The angelgate story, where Mike walks into a bar and finds angel investors who fund start-ups all seated at a table together, where he speculates that they may have been colluding on price-fixing, now appears in an entirely different light. He was already discussing the AOL deal and essentially had closed it by then, so he may have felt brazen, with AOL at his back, exposing those men.

But it also seems...eerie. Once you're in a giant corporation like AOL, does it *matter* any more, who is funding what little start-up and maybe buddying up to plan so nobody has to pay too much for this trinket, that they will sell back to each other another day?

The curious enacting of the signover seems joyless. The AOL guy seems uncomfortable and not that happy. I don't get what's in it for AOL. I guess it gives them traffic to buy ads that they sell?

And that's where we come in. There will presumably be more of us if the ads are things like Moms going back to school, with the dogs hanging out of the window of the family station wagon, instead of...Seagate or some geeky thing.

I guess they really made the money on the conferences, especially ones about start-ups and disruption and such where the speakers -- if it is anything like the rest of the industry's practices -- pay to be on a panel. That I can understand. It's like the way non-profits make their real money on the annual awards dinners.

I asked Arrington in the comments about his reflections on angelgate if he could tell us whether the angels that he now felt compelled to make nice to after this awkward meeting and his blogation about it in fact had paid to be on his panel. (That *is* usually the practice, it's a kind of industry advertising.)

But Loren's pronunciations about this are indeed grim. He says it's the end of blogging, the end of indies. Not of him, because he'll stay an indy, but he brutally pointed out that the big companies, like CNET, CNN, etc. -- they will rule the Google search, and get all the customers, and it will be very very hard to be seen.

There's a lot we don't know about all this and aren't being told. It's very odd that Arrington, coming from a company called *TECH*crunch, says he had "technical difficulties" with the engineers. That he faced constant problems with getting good engineers to...keep his blog software in order and his Crunchbase -- data base of tech companies -- in order. Huh? A blog platform and a dbase, and you couldn't run that? It's odd. After all, this isn't some interactive dynamic changing thing like Twitter with 12 million users or whatever, it's just a blog with 50,000 visitors a day or something, right?

It's not that I think AOL will encroach on Arrington's or MC Siegal's or Paul Carr's editorial independence. But they may gradually make it known that they don't like the snottyness of some of these people and their constant whining about nothing. They may decide they have to lose the really punchy reader comments -- Arrington on his own might feel in his setting of geeks that he dare not tamper with it, but when it is AOL's company, they can handily get rid of the trolls -- who of course, might be the people really criticizing AOL or Arrington legitimately, but they will call them trolls, as Arrington often does with anyone who crosses him.

Loren even said that Arrington was getting tired and wanted out of it because he was fed up with the draining negative comments and the trolls. Huh? The ones that are rabid and unhinged. But the legitimate ones have a point, and you learn from it. Why are geeks in the public eye like this so thin-skinned?

I really have to wonder how this is going to work. A taste of how weird it is comes with today's M.C. Siegler story on another acquisition:

Well, this is kind of awkward.

A couple weeks ago, we reported that AOL was in the process of acquiring of Thing Labs, makers of Brizzly. Neither AOL or Thing Labs would comment at the time, but we had multiple good sources on the deal. Fast forward to today: AOL is finally confirming the deal — right after they just acquired us.

So yes, like we said, AOL is acquiring Thing Labs. Only now, it’s technically our parent company that is buying them. So congrats to us, I guess?!

Erk, that kind of stuff is going to get old fast -- and when AOL tells them they can't comment, will they shut up, or publish a story about how AOL won't comment and then speculate -- like they do now?

I do have to admit that I think this will lead to TechCrunch losing its garage-band feel, and that's sad.

When Tim Armstrong of AOL says this kind of stuff, does he mean just injecting advertising into tech blog copy?

o he mismatches his comparisons -- the 1960s civil rights movement is contrasted with the effete snobs sitting ineffectively on Twitter with their "weak ties" -- when the comparison should be to the Iranian Revolution;

o and he shows a lot less familiarity with social movements in general and this technology in particular than anything else he's every written, which always came across as brilliant -- which is why this is a disappointment.

So because he *is* brilliant, I suspect that he will either revise much of these conclusions before the book comes out -- or else dig in and become emotionally invested in being a curmudgeon along with Morozov, and seal the debate over for a long time to come, using the New Yorker mindshare.

No matter. The revolution will be twittered not by him, but without him, then. And...a man who only has a grand total of...eight people (actually news services) that he follows, while having 61,000 followers (!) -- what can he *possibly* understand about Twitter?! [Update: those weren't his verified accounts. He doesn't have one -- CAF.]

I also think, although I don't know enough about Gladwell's background, that he has probably never been in a social movement. You know, carried a sign, demonstrated, marched on Washington, that sort of thing. Like Morozov, it shows; they both share both an excessive idealization of some movements, and an essential scorn for civic movements that don't run the way they think they should -- Gladwell seems completely entranced with the civil rights movement, which is certainly among the best causes Americans have ever fought for, but which is portrayed in a completely hagiographic form as a *form* of activism - and contrasts brave black men and women sitting in at lunch counters where they were barred and suffering beatings and jailings with...the white snobs of today who twitter inanely at their desks or on their expensive phones.It's as if unless you are murdered, you aren't authentic. It's like the way it's so hard to get diplomats to follow Raoul Wallenberg's example...

Of course, our civil rights movement should be compared to the Iranian revolution, or any other movement around the world struggling for rights, and Twitter is merely a tool that happens to appear at the same time as the Iranian revolution. Gladwell wants to tell us Twitter *is* merely a tool, and not a particularly good one, but because he gets so eloquent about contrasting the sufferings and hardships of the civil rights movement with people who only want to click on something today, he can't but help come across as fanatic (as I suspect Morozov is as well underneath at all) -- they are looking for some super people connector that will do it the *right* way yet still leave people available to be beaten up in meatworld -- and Twitter has disappointed.

Again -- I've written extensively, chapter and verse, in reply to Zuckerman's dissing of the Moldovan Twitter Revolution in his blog comments, and gotten only disdain and partial answers from. Frankly, I think my arguments are sound and his are lame here; he can't explain why it is that some twitter revolutions get blessed because he knows the people or likes the lefty cause for political reasons, but others don't, and they happen to be the anti-communist ones. That's not surprising for the lefties of yesteryear or today; they are ambivalent about communism and hate to be hating on it for fear of being branded as intolerant MacArthyites -- or simply uncool -- Zuckerman hastens to point out that *these* commies in Moldova were for economic reform and bank loans lol. Aren't they all?!

Gladwell comes so close to my own preferred theories about different levels of involvement for different types of people that it is frustrating not to see it fully acknowledged by him. That is, when he describes campaigns as working "By not asking too much of them," he can't seem to shed the *judgementalism* in saying that.

09/27/2010

A teacher at a Bronx elementary school has been reassigned after writing on a Web site about her past as a sex worker. In a short online article in The Huffington Post on Sept. 7, the teacher, Melissa Petro, criticized Craigslist for shutting down its “adult services” section, which carried sex-related advertising.

Ms. Petro wrote that from October 2006 to January 2007, she “accepted
money in exchange for sexual services I provided to men I met online.”

Petro goes on to write that she found the work hard and degrading and ended up quitting.

As we know, it is impossible to get rid of teachers in the New York City school system. They could come to school drunk and have affairs with the students and still wind up in the "rubber room," i.e. merely being "reassigned" or sent to some waiting area for months, collecting pay.

So this teacher isn't going anywhere. And that means Craig Newmark can follow Mark Zuckerberg's example and give a $100 million to the Bronx schools, on the condition that this teacher be let back. Wouldn't that be nifty?!

Danah Boyd has posted the most outrageous support of Craigslist, after it was finally pressured into closing its adult services sections by constant inquiries by the states attorney generals. Here this beloved tech and social media guru twists herself into a pretzel to run to her tribe's aid, and prostitutes herself into stumping for porn and prostitution -- although she has always styled herself as someone out to protect children and teenagers and claims she has a feminist perspective that condemns prostitution as exploitation.

Her argumentation is completely phony, and amounts to saying that by having all the prostitution in one controlled monitorable place, it will be easy to weed out the bad actors and also provide help more efficiently and swiftly to victims. That the entire system of Craigslist accelerates and facilitates victims seems to escape her. In fact, the real story of Craigslist if you look at it is that the personals are also the porn, and are also a cover for the prostitution in even worse form.

Meanwhile, both she and her dutiful fanboyz claim that if people don't have online ads and are driven to dark allies and seedy bars, they will face greater harm. But...they never explain how the people who use the online service to *meet* in a sleazy bar are going to do when they come to harm -- same difference.

Of course Craig Newmark himself has absolutely no scruples about this, and having made his first millions off the porn ads and the luring of online users to it can afford to posture and play the victim now and put CENSORED in the place where the ads used to be.

I can't even find my answer in the huge bundle of replies on this article that make Huffpo even more ridiculous to try to read than the New York Times, which at least tries to sort them into readers' highlights and editors' picks. Huffo has some game-like system that makes some people get colours to stand out, but there isn't voting to make answers rise to the top.

So here's my reply:

If what you say about congregating ads in one place was true, it could only be tested if Craig didn't take money for the ads. Then we might test his altruism and the premise. There's nothing magical about online as any greater form of publicity or help than anything else. Driving the ads offline means there are less of them, and less afforandance of abuse. Of course Craigslist doesn't cause murders of prostitutes; johns do. But Craigslist makes it more speedy and efficient, and that's wrong. Your notion that a prostitute should replace getting beat up by a john occasionally to avoid "oppression" by not having online ads is outrageous, truly. Listen to yourself! Advocating that a woman take a beating so that technocommunist empires like Craig's can go on thriving.

Danah, there you goes again, hustling for social media devs as part of the whole Silicon Valley IT cult. Frankly, you're disgraceful. Have you no sense of solidarity with human dignity? This isn't about sex workers' rights, if that's your point (you stop shy of taking that extremist labor position), but about Craigslist exploiting people's need for anonymous and easy sex to make a buck, and what a pernicious thing that is in society, undermining morals. Craigslist doesn't just make a nominal fee; he charges $10 for the adult services ads and made revenue of $45 million a year, according to the New York Times.

Your fellow Berkmanite Craig Newmark got amazingly wealthy from these ads primarily when they were even less regulated, and still does. His "censored" gambit is a petulant and entitlement-happy whine in the face of public opinion. The law may be on his side, but the attorneys general have taken this to the media and public precisely because they are looking for the morality that creates the substrate of the rule of law. This is about power. It's about the exploitative attitude that all your big social media dev pals take toward us users -- using us. Whether it's ebay or Facebook or Craigslist, the object is always to soak the tacky middle class that needs online more than the rich, eh? And then turn around and use those resources drained from increasingly poor people to fund various boutique leftist causes. Shame.

This is a worrisome development -- TED metasticizing. Releasing the branded concept for free with a license ensures even more spread of this tech cult.

I hate TED. I don't hate it because it's elitist and affluent and costs $6000 -- that's normal in the tech industry and conferences have to make money.

I hate it because it pretends to be innovative and open, and even makes a cult of the innovative and open, and yet it peddles always the same geek line, never permitting debate (the format is always to have a guru speak in front of an ecstatic and unquestioning audience without even any Q&A) and it often introduces new popularized tech horrors, like this truly loathsome concept of making everything in life a game propagandized by Jesse Schell (see above). Jesse's talk is a TED-recommended video featured on its website, not TED per se, but that's just it -- TED co-opts and picks and choses what ideas it will promote, and provides no venue for debating them.

Schell's video epitomizes everything about the TED ritualistic canon -- the pompous faux laid-back geek guru bounding out on stage, speaking in flippant sound bytes and lobbing prefabricated jokes, flipping the PowerPoint -- and advancing an awful idea that further undermines the human being's individuality and context in reality, and collectivizes him into a meta-game to "motivate him". Schell didn't think this up -- ludologists such as the failed economics professor Edward Castranova writes about tapping into the autonomous nervous system with the fight/flight/reward game paradigm to get people to work or socialize better.

It was an answer I didn't find on target, because James Paul Gee is just double-talking me there, in that superior tone that one can expect from one of his background and belief system, and saying that having a discussion after a game is going to cancel out the deep imprinting of habits of thinking that occur from playing the addictive games in the first place. He doesn't explain how the self-development of the brain in engagement with a text and with a teacher can take place in the rigidly game controlling environment that puts up coders' cultural cues and dictates users' answers. He also answers the longer version of my question -- I asked whether he'd rather be operated by on a doctor who learned from textbooks and labs and practice, or somebody who played WoW -- yet my question is truncated so you can't see I asked about that.

Education is where geeks are really hoping to take hold now, which explains Zuckerberg's $100 million for Newark, which I'll come back to.

The TED thing at first seems like the Crowdsourcing Chris Anderson is now finally going to democratize this elitist geek meet-up. But it's anything but that. Because the template for it -- you will require a license to put on one of his branded meet-ups -- helps disseminate his rigid unfree cultural norms.

Take a look at what you have to agree to:

Apparently you can. A TEDx license is required to organize an event. The rules: recipients must not be associated with a controversial or extremist group, and cannot use TEDx to promote religious or political beliefs, or to sell commercial goods. There are also rules governing the event format, including that speakers must be filmed and that they don’t speak for more than 18 minutes each. TEDx organizers cannot charge for tickets, though TED makes some exceptions for groups that need help with production costs. Organizers who want to charge a fee (which can’t exceed $100) must seek permission from TED.

This is wrong on so many levels:

o What is a "controversial" or "extremist group"? The Tea Party is a protest movement that the left constantly tries to portray as extremist. If anyone is a sympathizer, they couldn't put on a TED meeting. That's not just a brand; it's an ideological boot-camp. And perhaps it's justified to benefit from the lefty hippie transhumanist brand that TED wants to keep -- and of course that's their right. Except...they are packaging it as neutral "education" when in fact it's a cult.

And...what is "controversial"? Is a group I might put together of tekkies in NY who love this sort of thing going to be "controversial" because I have several blogs where I mercilessly skewer the TEDutopians? I'd likely be rejected a "license" -- which of course, is a very creepy thing to have to get to have a meeting, a very, very bad precedent in general in the Metaverse and of course indicative of the Wired State.

o The speakers can't speak for more than 18 minutes?! what's that all about?!

o You can't charge for tickets? Well that's just plain repressive. Especially when the TED people could be making money on this and license the brand in exchange for a standard cut.

o It's only on suffrance that you *might* be able to charge a fee, and then only $100. I guess that's because TED Central will still charge $6000 a pop for the real conference -- these other local ones are only sort of fan groups.

What's awful about this is how it fetched up on my Facebook "liked" by various vacuous indiscriminate tekkie types who thought this was a great way to learn -- at a free conference! "Llllearn" (they always use the jargonistic spin on the term to mean essentially "imbibe tech doctrine like a sponge" -- marked by the with rolling of the "l")

It's also disturbing to see that lazy teachers are using this in the classroom, and probably without any teaching materials that question any of the tech-religious doctrine. You can't even discuss the creationist beliefs in the classroom, but hey, you can peddle TED transhumanism.

“We know teachers are using the talks in classrooms,” said Lara Stein, TED’s licensing director. “What could we do to move that along?”

After all, as Mr. Anderson pointed out, the rise of online video means a teacher doesn’t have to be someone sitting in front of a classroom talking to 30 people. Especially if something like TEDx can make learning and social change “sexy,” as Ms. Kim of Ashoka put it.

“It’s an experience,” she said. “It’s not a lecture. It’s transformational. That’s why people like me are hooked.”

See? It's a camp meeting. Parents should question this. And make sure that if these TED cult movies are shown, that there is a Q&A that DEBATES the science-ology that gets unquestioningly disseminated through this new insidious program.

I'm not one of those hate-the-rich people. I think it's great if people like Warren Beaty make a buck and "add value" as the Silicon Valley tekkies always describe the phenomenon of having a knack to make a buck and get other people to work for you -- no trivial matter.

But it's not only all the reviews out for "The Social Network" (the story of Zuckerberg and Facebook) that has me wondering exactly whether these riches are in a way ill-gotten gains.

I'm not a socialist, and certainly not a techno-commie like the rest of the wired world, and I don't subscribe to the religious belief of some of the Internet that one man's riches are another man's losses. That's Soviet thinking, of the type "If he has two cows, rather than emulating him and earning one, too, I'll get the state to seize one of them and give it to me." Jesus Christ didn't teach that the Church or the State should take your shirt off your back to give to the man without one, but that you should give it voluntarily. Difference.

Even so, I wonder about these millions. Are they real? I mean, aren't they all on paper? Or on pixels. If they are all in pixels of Microsoft or the Valley's valuation, are they really available to give to the Newark school system? What happens to Newark if everybody stampedes out of Facebook like they did out of Myspace? Do the kids in Newark get Madoffed?

But the larger question is: where did these riches come from? They didn't come from making a tangible product in the real world, a widget that got sold and advertised so that more widgets could be manufactured. It didn't come from a tangible service like a railroad. It came out of thin air, literally, and not even as a digital commodity, like a song, but as merely a connection. A platform where everybody *else* takes their digital commodities like pictures or thoughts or facts or news and exchanges them largely for free. So its everybody else -- all of us, 500 million -- working, and working for free.

Oh, to be sure, some of the super big users of this platform like Zynga or certain API engineers struck it rich and collect all the game gold. But most people can't really say they ever earned a dime off facebook, although they might have spent even $50 or $100 or more on buying virtual gifts to send to friends or game pieces. The actual money that comes in from the VC guys itself isn't real, and comes from...some other fake place of valuation and loans and non-reality.

So it strikes me that it's not like the railroad or mineral or even Hollywood wealth of past centuries, but really a house of cards.

Of course, these big social media businesses employ people, so you could say that the provide jobs like any tycoon's business provided jobs in yesteryear. But the jobs seem insecure, with large layoffs or collapses of the lesser businesses around the social media magnates getting bought up or forced out of business into failure.

I couldn't seem to get more data about this but then I stumbled on this blogger named John Robb with a blog named Global Guerillas who had the same concerns about the social media giants' wealth not really seeming to benefit users or society at large -- but for different motivations than mine. This fellow seems like a quintessentially techocommie of the early anarcho-communist phase, i.e. where he's praising disruption and flippantly asking his friends whether globalization (the Internet) has undermined values, and then not condemning this, but acting as if it is something to take advantage of.

He's more likely one of those transhumanist Randians like Brian McGroarty (Soft Linden) -- his blog banner says this, the sort of thing where I reach for my gun:

All the arrogance of the Yalie and the former USAF, and always leaves you wondering whether his stark analysis about all the "unstoppable" evil and crime in the world is part of what...makes it possible to go on existing because he's smart, yet believes in its power -- and worse, believes in "open source networks" as modern tools of warfare to stop *what those networks* define as evil. Gosh, that's fun. 4chan on steroids.

Even so, it's one of the few brainy and interesting blogs out there in a world where most people just copy other people and CNET, so his "Cognitive Slaves" makes interesting reading, especially if you figure that the "Cognitive Surplus" that Clay Shirky warbles about is in fact turning into...this. Millions of people diddling on Facebook.

Robb has a thesis that there are 100,000 "power users" on Facebook are what enables Zuckerman to make his billions:

Let's take Facebook as an example. Currently it's valued at ~$25
billion by the market. However, it could be argued that ~100,000 superusers out
of 500 million part time users, are the reason that Facebook is
valuable. They generate the core network that is the backbone of the
tool. Their devoted use, high levels of connectivity, and loyalty forms
the engine that grows Facebook, year in and year out. They are the
materials, labor, and product of Facebook's assembly line. Yet
they aren't paid for their effort. They aren't generating wealth for
themselves or their families.

I'd like to understand more about that. I understand how that attention and participation helps moneterize the platform of Second Life for the Lindens and how may wage-slavery there benefits them with their rents and commissions even when I'm in business making a buck.

But how do users provide the materials and labour? Does he mean the API engineers? They make a buck, but not much of one, in most cases. Or does he mean the sheer fact that the power curve content-creators who always make the 10 percent that the 90 percent look at are busy photographing, thinking, writing, culling news articles that keep the others glued to Facebook, and of course clicking on the ads and buying the game pieces. I guess that's his point.

In SL, we can value our piece of the $550 million in actual sales by looking at the actual $55 million or whatever it is that actually cashes out, and the concrete list of people (statistics now being hidden) that made $10 US or $5000 US (there were some 2,000 that made more than $2000 US).

But how does that work in FB?

Here's where we need to page VW skeptic of decades cube3. Says Lind:

One way to look at this is that we are truly in trouble. If the
industries of the future are based on cognitive slavery, we all lose.
However, as an entrepreneur, an optimist (believe it or not), and a
believer in the potential for social/economic improvement, I think this
can be corrected. I believe it's possible to build tools and the
companies that manage them, in a way that actually rewards the people
that do most of the work. All we need to do is make it possible.

Well, news flash, big guy. We *already* lost. You beloved disruptive ethics-free entrepreneurial friends *already* destroyed the music, news, book-publishing and movie business, and could be credited for some of the banking disaster as well. Had enough yet? Now they will be headed toward destroying government, health care, and education by disrupting existing institutions of governance, exposing people's privacy, and disintegrating formal studies in to splinters, in the "all knowledge is on the network" (KoN) plan. Happy?

Where's the wealth going to come from? When the Roosevelts and the Vanderbilts and the Fords and such of the world made their fortunes, they left behind cars and roads and then hospitals and foundations. What will Zuckerman leave? Your Farmville tractor and lots of pictures of your friends drunk at parties? The legacy in Newark is going to be a story about how technological hubris destroyed the chances of yet another city's children.

BTW, this blog delivers, and the comments have some smart people in them too, although of course it has that geeky loon stuff you find in people who glory in "disruptive technology."

I do have to wonder, however, why St. Martin's Press wouldn't, before publication, in the interests of national security considerations that seem pretty compelling, leave the material out as requested -- but maybe they didn't get the memo after the DIA decided the Army's clearance was overbroad. They could have gotten all victimy and put CENSORED like Craig Newmark did with the porn sections of Craiglist.

But to try to burn away a security threat that was probably long ago scanned or sent around on email from its galleys, which are all electronic in this day and age -- well, it seems nutty. The bad PR alone is worth not doing it.

WikiLeaks is supposed to be, um, this incredibly distributed and networked and flexible and non-hierarchical outfit that functions so well because it has none of those old-fashioned hidebound institutional rules and obstacles like arrogant bosses who think they are in charge *cough*. But, as gawker.com explains,

German newspaper Der Spiegelreports
that Schmitt quit amid tensions with Assange. Schmitt told Der Spiegel
that Assange had started focusing too much on large projects—like the
massive 77,000-document Afghanistan leak—instead of the many smaller
leaks that used to be Wikileaks' trade. Anytime Schmitt criticized
Assange's plans, Assange shot back "that I was disobedient to him and
unloyal to the project."

At first glance, it looks as if the Internet freedom-fighters need to switch their targets from Iran and China to...the United States, France, and Brazil given how much the net nannies are running to Daddy Google to discipline others.

The U.S. -- by a landslide! -- has made the most requests for data on customers and blocks of information any other country on earth -- 4,000 in a six-month period, with Brazil next at 2,000 plus and India at 1,000 plus.

What Google won't explain, however, is whether this is *censorship of political data* or related to child pornography or terrorism. And that's why this "Google 2.0 transparency" is rather...partial.That is, it says that very few political requests are in fact reflected in this data, but they simply make no explanation at all about that high U.S. number.

Perhaps there is a multiplier effect at work: because the U.S. has a very robust Internet and Google is based in the U.S. and the system for removal is known, the U.S. may tend to show up more as a user of this "removals" request than other countries that may not have yet figured out to make recourse of it.

Google explains that for Brazil, as for India, the high number of requests for information on customers is explained by its wildly popular social website Orkut -- wildly popular in some countries anyway, as it is one of those Google platforms that didn't take on elsewhere, but did in those countries, in the millions. Most of the requests have to do with asking for information on users charged with "defamation".

I'm going to state the cliche here and say that this is likely because Brazil has a culture of honour and respect as well as a heightened sense of defamation from its traditions and laws, like certain other Latin American cultures -- this is an obvious fact. And here it shows up in spades -- somebody dissed somebody else, somebody looked cross-eyed, out come fingers to punch the Abuse Report buttons and get someone "removed from the Internet". Impersonization is the other problem reported.

Judging from Second Life, I thought it might be something about scams or content theft, as regretably, the vibrant and -- for a time surging -- community of Brazil in SL had a certain percentage of copy-botters and scammers. (But Google is *not* counting copyright-requests in this data.)

I constantly was plagued by several con artists who would either put invisiprims over my rental boxes and siphon my tenants' money off to themselves, or actually, in a ballsy gambit that I had to marvel at, call themselves representatives of my business, take photos of my properties and put them in their profiles, and go around with a group title saying they were Ravenglass mangers and extort and demand rental or protection payments that way.

One guy amazingly moved in on a lot where somebody hadn't paid on time, said he was the girl's roomie and would pay, got put in resident status with that lie, then proceeded to build -- and rent out within 24 hours -- a high-rise apartment building that sucked down every prim on the sim -- oh, and a car store and a fashion runway. It was so outrageous, and something so unexpected, that I at first thought it was someone next door to me, and actually let it go for several days before I realized that it was on my property. Amazing! A guy like that, you don't know whether to hire him -- or ban him from your sim.

Others have had their designs ripped off by Brazilians or suffered other business-in-a-box rip-offs. The fact is, the first victims of such Brazilians is...other Brazilians. Even so, the prejudice that these incidents from a minority of the community sparks is enormous, and it's gotten so some people simply ban Brazilians on sight. I have loads of them as customers, and I have to say that they are incredible energy for socializing and entrepreneurship. We use HUD translators to converse. Brazil, out of all the BRIC up-and-comers, will take over the earth, I'm sure.

But...we do need to get them to climb down from this crazy macho stuff where every insult is viewed as a reason to call Google and get someone removed.

Now, what's wrong with this picture! This is as truthy as truthyness gets, because the U.S. least of countries block the Internet -- the UK is highly represented due to its libel law venue shopping; the U.S. has First Amendment protections. The high traffic of requests doesn't equal a regime of censorship; Iran isn't reflecting its real role as a notorious Internet enemy.

Russia is reported as "fewer than 10". That's ridiculous, because they do take down sites and block material -- but that's just it. They are big enough with a sophisticated enough Internet of their own that maybe they don't need to call Google, they do their own blocking. Because of the language barrier, most customers are going to be on Yandex.ru or somewhere else searching anyway -- I'm not sure how much they use Google per se.

And while everyone thinks Google is a hero for standing up to China, note that they still cave on some things:

You may have noticed that there’s a question mark for content removal
requests from China. As noted in the map, Chinese officials consider
censorship demands as state secrets, so we cannot disclose that
information at this time.

Another inexplicable thing that Google does, despite the ability to disaggregate numbers they crunch with all the brainpower and technical capacity they have, is say they can't capture certain data:

Similarly, if a governmental agency used a web form to demand removal of
content, we generally have no way of including those reports in our
statistics.

and:

Our policies and systems are set up to identify and remove child
pornography whenever we become aware of it, regardless of whether that
request comes from the government. As a result, it’s difficult to
accurately track which of those removals were requested by governments,
and we haven’t included those statistics here.

That's all very political, because they could be supplying this information if they had the will.

All in all, it makes for fascinating reading, with things like this:

We also received a demand in late 2009 from a Canadian politician for
the removal of a blog criticizing his policies. Again, we declined to
remove the blog, because it did not violate our policies.

For example, in May we received a request from a local ministry in
Kazakhstan to remove the YouTube channel for a TV channel supportive of
the opposition. We did not comply.

Note that Google completely chickened out and did not include requests for copyright theft on YouTube. Shame on them!